Valve: No gaming box coming

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If you've put off buying that games console because you thought that Valve, the people behind Half-life and now the Steam gaming service, were about to launch their own gaming box don't - the company has said it isn't happening.

"We're prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI and getting ready to ship that, so we're building boxes to test that on," Doug Lombardi, Valve's marketing director, explained to gaming site Kotaku when asked to clarify rumours that they were planning on making a new gaming box to be released at gaming convention GDC.

That Big Picture Mode UI is actually a new interface Steam is working on that will allow people to get an experience more designed to be seen on the TV, if they connect their PC to their TV.

"We're also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we've talked about a fair amount," Lombardi said.

"All of that is stuff that we're working on, but it's a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware."

According to the site, Lombardi refused to flat-out say that Valve isn't working on a console, but said the confusion probably came from the fact that the company has a number of reference boxes it uses for testing and developing and that someone put two and two together to make 15.